Nabokov’s accurate translation and meticulous commentary on Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin remains unsurpassed; after Shakespeare, Nabokov considered Pushkin the greatest poet and once said that steady reading of Pushkin would increase the readers’ lung size. Published in four volumes in 1964, this controversial work kindled a new wave of interest in Pushkin in the English-speaking world. It demonstrated, among other things, Pushkin’s close connections with European culture, an important point for the cosmopolitan Nabokov, and his compatriot Stravinsky.
But Nabokov’s greatest contribution to the creation of the American image of St. Petersburg is his Speak, Memory, which many consider among the best autobiographies ever written. Serialized in The New Yorker and other American magazines in the last years of the forties and published as a book in 1951 (with the title Conclusive Evidence, which was later changed; in 1954 the Russian version appeared as Drugie Berega), Nabokov’s autobiography was enthusiastically received by critics both then and in 1967, when the author revised and expanded what was probably his most personal book.
Petersburg was a leading theme in Nabokov’s poetry. The émigré existence added nostalgic overtones: Nabokov tirelessly returned in his poems to his native city, lovingly going over the fading images of “my light, my airy Petrograd.” (I had a unique opportunity to examine the notebook in which the young Nabokov wrote his poetry; its title page had a drawing of a Petersburg landscape.) In his verse Nabokov responded to the death of his beloved Blok and the execution of Gumilyov. One of Nabokov’s best poems of his Berlin period (“Memory, sharp ray, transform my exile …”) paints a fantastic picture of Petersburg in the style of Dobuzhinsky and is dedicated to the artist, a fellow émigré who in Petersburg gave the teenaged Nabokov drawing lessons, which the writer applied gratefully, as he put it, “to certain camera-lucida needs of literary composition.”
In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s tour de force, the writer emphasizes the role of the artists of Mir iskusstva, Dobuzhinsky and Benois, in the creation of that stylized image of “modernist” Petersburg, which Nabokov in turn wanted to engrave in the consciousness of the American reader. The main themes of that autobiography are memory, fate, freedom, and the possibility/impossibility of choice; the main mystery is the nature and essence of time. At almost every turn in the narrative Nabokov somehow touches on Petersburg, which becomes the leitmotif of the book.
The portrait of the city, first purely descriptive, then social and political, forms kaleidoscopically as if from a multitude of pieces of colored glass, a favorite method of Nabokov’s. The writer teases the reader, distracting his attention and then, like the experienced professor he was, suddenly gives a brief but stern lecture. The sharp homilies attempted to dispel the prejudices and doubts of American intellectuals about the existence of a liberal and cosmopolitan culture in prerevolutionary Petersburg, of which Nabokov proudly considered himself a rightful member and heir.
It was not an easy task. In 1949, The New Yorker refused to print the chapter of Speak, Memory in which Nabokov insisted that there was more freedom in tsarist Russia than under Lenin—a thesis at odds with the grim picture of tsarist Petersburg created by Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment and still current in the popular imagination. Nabokov’s firm political convictions, supported by his literary mastery, did, however, have their effect. Gradually, as his literary reputation grew, he worked his vision of Petersburg into the intellectual center of the American elite. By the time Nabokov’s autobiography appeared in print, it was greeted as a masterpiece. And his Petersburg took its place next to that of Dostoyevsky—a pioneering achievement of historical and cultural importance, opening the door for other practitioners of the American branch of Petersburg modernism.
As modernists with Petersburg roots, Nabokov and Stravinsky had much in common. They were related by the theatricality of their works, the paradoxicality of their creative thought, the love of playing with art “models” (literary ones for Nabokov, musical for Stravinsky), as well as an incorrigible tendency toward irony and the grotesque.
Nabokov’s novels are full of literary mystifications and allusions; often the “literary scenery” and point of view shift suddenly to reveal the presence of the omnipotent author. Alfred Schnittke, in his essay concerning paradoxicality as a trait of Stravinsky’s musical logic, analyzed the similar methods in the work of the composer (in particular Apollon Musagete):
